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--- projects:canadawest:progress [2014/09/13 14:01] – [Saturday, September 13th 2014] canadawest
+++ projects:canadawest:progress [2015/02/10 05:07] (current) – [Monday, February 9th 2015] canadawest
@@ Line 22: / Line 22: @@
 I awoke this morning to a phone call from John, about the SFOC.  He reiterated mostly what I read online.\\
-Before I submit an SFOC, I'll want to put together a really good application.  He seemed to also be under the impression that I need a SFOC to launch a launch a balloon, but I don't think so.
+Before I submit an SFOC, I'll want to put together a really good application.  He seemed to also be under the impression that I need a SFOC to launch a balloon, but I don't think so.
 ====== Tuesday, Oct 30th 2012 ======
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 In the mean time, I rewired the HK transmitters to work with an OSD cable.  I think this should work well too. I will tansition to this setup for the near future.
+====== Monday, October 6th 2014 ======
+I've just been doing a lot of flying, a lot of crashing and repairing. The drone on the big Bixler was working quite well. Autonomous landing seem to be the tricky part mostly with the landing though.\\
+It had an unfortunate incident with a tree and another mis-repair with a wooden spar versus a now metal spar.\\
+It should be ready to go now.
+The big news is that the large foamie is now ready to be tested again. Hopefully I can get out in the next couple of days and see if it flies.
+I also managed to get the Hobby King wireless communication up and running with the telemetry. It works like a dream; much better and the Flytron.
+====== Tuesday, February 3rd 2015 ======
+I have been flying the bixler with fair frequency this year, as weather allows.
+I have also been emboldened to broaden the scope of the drone part of this project to be controlled by an Air Traffic Controller, of my own making.
+It occurs to me that the immediate future of drones lies not in flying everywhere, but from designated site-to-site paths.  A controller interface that would track all aircraft along a given corridor and route them appropriately is an important piece of infrastructure.
+I believe most of the technology to accomplish this already exists.  There are many Mavlink compatible programs for controlling an aircraft. They are all capable of connecting to the drone via a network connection as well as directly to the USB transmitter.
+Mavproxy is a neccesary in-between that can share one transmitter across many devices, all using Mavlink over tcp/ip.
+A pilot can connect to it locally, as well as to an ATC. The drone can be programmed with waypoints that the ATC can read and manipulate.
+Development can also be facilitated by Software In The Loop simulations of drones.
+More to come.
+====== Tuesday, February 3rd 2015 ======
+This is turning out quite well. There is only one hurtle that eludes me, and that is Guided mode.  For the time being though, I don't think I need to worry about that funtion to make something functional.
+SITL is turning out to be extremely helpful. Hopefully by the end of the weekend, I will have something to show.
+====== Monday, February 9th 2015 ======
+[[http://droneatc.ca|droneatc.ca]] and [[http://droneatc.org|droneatc.org]] are now online.
+If you have MAVProxy set up, you should be able to point them there soon by entering:\\
+output add droneatc.ca:14550
+For now I just have 2 test drones flying around in circles.
+If you do connect, please note that at this time the site is in Alpha, and I take no responsibility should a drone crash due to interactions with this service. Yeah, disclaimers.
+I have tested connection to the domain from within my house, and it seems to work.\\
+I will do a test with my Pi connected to my phone's WiFi, but not at this time.
+Thhe algorythm I use is pretty basic, but it should stop collisions for the sake of demoing it as a proof-of-concept at the very least.\\
+For now, I intervene if the drones are within 20 metres of each other, or within 5 seconds of possibly colliding.
+It works great if they're chasing each other, doing a head-on collision, or most other angles.\\
+The only scenario that's causing a near-miss is when one is doing a tight turn towards the other and ends up turning into their broadside.\\
+This can easily be fixed by making the conditions where it intervenes more conservative. 20m and 5 seconds is pretty close to be manuvreing together when ther're planes traveling at 20m/s.
+I have some to-do items.  For one, I have to better track the state of the drones.  I am assuming the drone wants to be set to Auto when it is done.  That's not always the case.  I would like one to just loiter while the other flies at it from different directions.
+I also assume the minimum turning radius is 10m.
+All these things can be made better by profiling the droens better and assessing their capabilities automatically.
+I would like to try sending messages to the pilot's ground station, and perhaps finding a way to interact with them.
+It's worth mentioning that the current strategy the back-end takes is to prevent collisions by enforcing distance between two drones.  It will intervene even when two drones will fly by eack other within a certain distance of each other.
+I'm going to see if I can drum up some interest on other websites.